"Those Fucking Hypocrites"

Believing that to "achieve American renown is to be complicit in a criminal culture," poet Bill Knott has executed some inspiring acts of self-sabotage.

When, prior to publishing his 2004 collection The Unsubscriber, FSG arranged to have some of his short poems published in Poetry, Knott wrote of being crushed and feeling betrayed. “They ‘accepted’ poems from FSG, but not from me, never from me,” he wrote on his blog, “and don’t believe those fucking hypocrites if they tell you anything different.” Eventually Knott walked away from FSG too. (“It was clear that for Bill,” FSG president and publisher Jonathan Galassi told the New York Observer in 2011, “being published by us wasn’t good for him psychically.”) Black Ocean’s founder, Janaka Stucky, says he finds Knott’s early books to be “some of the best American poetry collections of the 20th century—and they’ve been highly influential on poets and artists of my generation.” When he asked Knott if he could bring these early works back into print, Knott turned him down. “If I don’t want to do it with Farrar Straus,” he wrote, “why would I want to do it with Black Ocean?”